Wednesday, December 14, 2016

My New Fears For My Husband's Safety - Laura Justo

As news has emerged of the Royal pardon granted by Thailand to the Swiss national Xavier Justo, his wife has received two serious warnings from high level sources that Malaysian related entities have been instructed not to let him leave the country alive.

Sarawak Report has confirmed that the two entirely separate sources have tonight indicated that there is a ‘Black Ops’ notice out to ensure that an ‘accident’ befalls Justo during his vulnerable journey from the jail, where he has been securely protected, first to emigration and then the airport. He is due to be released in the coming days.

“The instructions come from Malaysia”

“The instructions are from Malaysia” one key source which has high level security links has warned Sarawak Report. “They plan to use local operatives with connections to official bodies to make sure he will not make it out of Bangkok”.

Another separate source also approached Sarawak Report this evening “Either an accident or a hit man, there are Malaysian related entities with far-reaching contacts in Thailand and there is evidence that the instruction has gone out”.

The news has thrown Swiss based Laura Justo, who has been waiting in Geneva anxiously for her husband for several months, into a new state of anxiety.

This evening she told Sarawak Report that she has notified her lawyers, The Swiss Embassy and several international law enforcement bodies about the level of the threat, but she is fearful that they may fail to provide adequate protection for her husband once he leaves the jail.

“The Swiss officials are already been aware of the possible threat” Laura told Sarawak Report this evening, ” but I do not know if they will do enough to protect him. It depends on the size of the planned operation to kill him”

Laura says she is also fearful of an attempt to kidnap Justo.

The Malaysian authorities have made no secret of their determination to lay hands on the key whistleblower, who was imprisoned June 2015 for revealing details of the PetroSaudi deal, which has led to the unravelling of the world’s biggest ever kleptocracy case related to Malaysia’s development fund, 1MDB.

Justo had originally been promised his release back in August, not long after the US Department of Justice lodged its asset seizure notice for a billion dollars worth of property with the California District Court. Just yesterday a US Federal Court Judge rejected an attempt by Jho Low (the prime minister’s key advisor on 1MDB) to stay that seizure on assets held in the name of himself and his family.

However, just days before the papers were due to be signed Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak made an extended visit to Bangkok and placed Justo at the top of the agenda for talks.

The Prime Minister made plain that he wanted the Swiss National to be extradited to Malaysia, even though there is no evidence that the country has any rights of jurisdiction in the case, which concerned an accusation of blackmail by PetroSaudi against their former Director and his acquisition of their company data.

Sources have told Sarawak Report that Thailand has refused to allow the unwarranted extradition request, which has been fiercely challenged by the Swiss authorities who believe their national has been targeted for being a whistleblower. Having now served 18 months he was eligible to return home to Switzerland.

Najib wants Justo in jail

There are questions as to what, if any, new information Xavier Justo can bring to further investigations into 1MDB, which are now at an advanced stage in several countries which have been engaged in a cross border collaboration to trace up to $7 billion which are calculated to have gone missing from the fund.

Justo has already provided the data relating to the original PetroSaudi deal from which $1.83 billion was siphoned from the fund and the US has obtained extensive details of the dollar transactions that were involved. Numerous banks are now also collaborating with investigators from at least 7 countries and several accounts are frozen.

Furthermore, two senior executives from the Abu Dhabi fund Aabar, who were implicated in thefts are now also in jail in Abu Dhabi and believed to be cooperating with their authorities who have lodged a major case to reclaim $6.5 billion from 1MDB.

Nevertheless, recorded conversations and text messages from PetroSaudi Director Patrick Mahony, which were sent last year, make quite clear that he believed that Najib was fearful at the thought of Justo ever being let free. “A prime minister of a country is in deep shit” Mahony told Laura Justo in French in October last year. He made clear that Najib was controlling Justo’s imprisonment and that if he wanted to be let free he needed to demonstrate that he would not speak against him after his release.

Mahony also made a number of demands that Justo and his wife should make statements to the press that assisted Najib and accused critics of 1MDB of dishonesty, in particular Sarawak Report.

After 18 months of separation from her husband, during which time Justo has seen his son just once, Laura says all she wants is to have he safely home in Switzerland. She believes he is no use and no threat to anyone in Malaysia.

“I cannot take much more of this. I am so scared”

She told Sarawak Report after the two separate warnings about the plans to kill him reached her early on Thursday evening.

Friday, December 9, 2016

In an extraordinary twist, a new Malaysian website has conflated George Soros, Tony Blair, former US Vice President Al Gore, the “Clinton team,” the aristocratic Rothschild family, Federal Bureau of Investigation deputy chief Andrew McCabe, former golfing buddy and US President Barack Obama, UK critic Clare Rewcastle Brown and her husband, unnamed individuals from the Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan investment banks, and a flock of locals into elements of a conspiracy “to restructure the East Asian economy and political landscape,” but particularly arrayed against Malaysia and its prime minister Najib Razak.

The website, “Malaysia Outlook,” written by the pseudonymous “Third Force,” has printed four exhaustive articles detailing the conspiracy, “a nexus of associations linking key individuals, establishments, institutions and agencies, complicit with global elites to effect regime changes in Malaysia and Indonesia.”

In fact, however, the website appears to be the latest attempt to protect Najib from public scrutiny of overwhelming international evidence of his complicity in the biggest scandal in Malaysian history, the theft of at least US$2.5 billion and perhaps as much as US$4 billion from 1Malaysia Development Bhd., the state-backed investment firm that was so disastrously overseen that it is believed to have lost as much as RM50 billion (US$11.316 billion) through theft and mismanagement. An unknown amount of that money allegedly went to finance Red Granite Pictures, the Hollywood entity that produced the blockbuster movie “Wolf of Wall Street. “

The lead investigation is in the hands of the US Justice Department, which in July issued a 136-page document alleging that “over the course of an approximately four year period, between approximately 2009 and at least 2013, multiple individuals, including public officials and their associates, conspired to fraudulently divert billions of dollars from 1MDB through various means, including by defrauding foreign banks and by sending foreign wire communications in furtherance of the scheme, and thereafter, to launder the proceeds of that criminal conduct, including and through U.S financial institutions.

“The funds diverted from 1MDB were used for the personal benefit of the co-conspirators and their relatives and associates, including to purchase luxury real estate in the United States, pay gambling expenses in Las Vegas casinos, acquire more than US$100 million in artwork, invest in a major New York development project, and fund the production of major Hollywood films. 1MDB maintained no interest in these assets and saw no returns on these investments.”

For months, Najib and his cronies in the United Malays National Organization, the country’s biggest political party, have been attempting to wriggle free from domestic and international charges over the theft of the money. According to multiple sources in Kuala Lumpur, he has survived as prime minister primarily by bribing the 190-odd cadres who determine the leadership of UMNO to keep him in power. UMNO leadership confers automatic status as prime minister.

Against devastating articles in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Sarawak Report, Asia Sentinel and other publications, Najib, who is alleged to have diverted at least US$681 million and perhaps as much as US$1 billion into his own accounts, is believed to have mounted a flurry of online fake new outlets, the best-funded of which appears to be Malaysia Outlook.

Malaysia Outlook is said to be the brainchild of Habibur Rahman Kadir Shah, an accountant and a long-time associate of Najib Razak. Habibur was previously an UMNO Youth head in the Kuala Lumpur suburb of Petaling Jaya when Najib was national youth head. The two became close friends.

“Najib has given control of running the media hounds to Habibur, who has been at it since Najib became Prime Minister,” said a well-connected political source in Kuala Lumpur. Habibur, in addition to serving as the informal media dictator to the Star, the New Straits Times Press and TV3 – the three most prominent English-language media outlets – is reportedly the controller and paymaster, with Najib’s money, for the bloggers who write for Malaysia Outlook, including Raja Petra Kamarudin, who formerly was a major opposition blogger but who has since joined Najib’s crew.

The key members of the team are said to be Raja Petra Kamarudin, universally known as RPK, as well as Rahmat Haniff, the son of a former Inspector General of Police Haniff Omar , who calls himself seademon, and Zakir Mohamad,* who writes a blog called bigdogdotcom. They are said to be paid well to produce what appears to be the very definition of fake news.

In recent weeks, the Malaysian government has raised the ante against opposition figures, briefly jailing Maria Chin Abdullah, the head of the electoral reform organization Bersih 2.0 (“clean”) and attacking the editor and publisher of Malaysiakini, the country’s most popular independent news website, on allegations they are in the pay of Soros, who is accused of attempting to destabilize the country.

But a close look at the US Justice Department document paints a picture not of an international conspiracy against Malaysia but of a breathtaking campaign to divert billions of dollars out of 1MDB and into the hands of the prime minister, known in the document as “Malaysian Official 1” and his family, beginning in 2009 with the diversion of funds into a corporate entity called “Good Star” under the pretense of investing in a middle-eastern oil exploration company called Petro Saudi.

As much as US$1 billon was allegedly diverted into Swiss bank account held by Good Star Ltd., whose beneficial owner was Jho Taek Low, better known as Jho Low, the youthful, rotund Penang-born financial whiz who convinced Najib to set up 1MDB in the first place.

As has been widely reported, billions more were diverted through an entity called Aabar-BVI, which “was created and named to give the impression that it was associated with Aabar Investments PJS,” a legitimate subsidiary of the International Petroleum Investment Company, a state-owned Abu Dhabi investment concern.

And where did the money go? It poured into a stunning assortment of US real estate and other properties. That includes, but was not limited to:

GREENE CONDOMINIUM: real property located in New York, New York owned by the 118 Greene Street, a shell company.

EMI ASSETS: including copyright and intellectual property rights, as well as the right to collect and receive any profits, royalties, and proceeds of distribution owned by or owed to JW Nile (BVI), Ltd.; JCL Media, a shell company.

THE QENTAS TOWNHOUSE: located in London, United Kingdom, owned by Qentas Holdings Ltd., a shell company.

Those transactions are reported in exhaustive detail in the US Justice Department’s filing, which is worth reading for its entertainment value if not its educational value for the citizens of Malaysia. If it is fiction constructed to destabilize the country and bring down Najib, it is a far more sophisticated job than The Malaysia Outlook. Then again, the chances are better that it is real.

*Sheikh Muzzaffar was inadvertently identified as the blogger who writes bigdogdotcom. Asia Sentinel regrets the error.